Letwin and the bin – it's more funny than serious

Oliver Letwin: At least he didn’t throw the papers into the bushes and was worldly enough to tear some in half Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

I don't know about you, but I was greatly cheered by this morning's pictures in the Daily Mirror of Oliver Letwin, David Cameron's policy wonk, juggling his mobile phone in a distracted way while throwing important papers into waste paper bins in St James's Park, just across the road from his Whitehall office.

Why? Because, as far as I can tell, it's more funny than serious – and we all need something to laugh about in these grim economic times.

Oliver, brace yourself for a Private Eye cover photo with the caption bubble saying something along the lines of: "Don't worry about Cleggster – I've just thrown the coalition agreement in the bin."

I realise the Mirror is trying to persuade us that the man it is calling a "pint-sized millionaire buffoon" was tossing away top secret state papers that will hugely embarrass David Cameron's government – a kind of bin man's version of WikiLeaks (which weren't quite as earth-shattering as we were told, either).

I'm sure if I had the photographic evidence (plus 100 discarded papers of government and constituency correspondence), I might have been tempted to inflate their importance too.

But the Mirror is half right. The Cabinet Office minister, a very nice and clever man, is best treated affectionately as a "millionaire buffoon" (no heightism here!), the government's Professor Branestawm who should not be allowed out in a park on his own.

Letwin has form for unwelcome candour, and had to be hidden away in Dorset during much of the 2001 election campaign. He had shown too much enthusiasm for spending cuts – the kind now being imposed courtesy of the banker and Gordon Brown-driven deficit crisis.

Something similar happened in the 2005 campaign, so that Brown thought he could get away with scare tactics again five years later: he's a high IQ type, too.

Of course, Letwin should have had a carrier bag when walking, reading and thinking in the park early on pleasant summer mornings (this great breach of national security took place many weeks ago) so he could bring discarded papers back to the Cabinet Office, where they would routinely be shredded. But Letwin is not the practical type.

At least he didn't throw the papers into the bushes and was worldly enough to tear some of them in half, though constituents' details and a harsh verdict on the rendition affair ("failed to get to the truth") are among the tit-bits the Mirror obtained.

But the Cabinet Office is probably right to insist that no really sensitive material was involved. So we comparative thickos can enjoy marvelling at this glimpse of how clever chaps – Letwin is a former Rothschild investment banker, Thatcher adviser and visiting prof at Princeton, not a job they give to everyone – can behave if let off the leash.

Oh yes, he was also born in Hampstead, a place attacked as a Guardianista ghetto by Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, this week. It should all make us feel much better.

The Mirror's tireless class warrior, my ex-Guardian colleague Kevin Maguire, is uncharacteristically unfair today when he lumps Letwin in with Liam Fox as a pair of Carry On boobies. Whatever it turns out that the defence secretary has been up to (not long to wait now), it is more serious than Letwin.

But Letwin is a type familiar in government – a high IQ ideologue who thinks in conceptual terms but does not always grasp the practical and political implications of what he or she believes would be a liberating policy reform for troubled parts of Britain and its economy.

The late Richard Crossman, an Oxford don and leftwinger who ran social security in the 60s, was a similar type, and left a pile of much more important papers on a train.

What a fuss there was! There always is – though I doubt if Whitehall is worse organised than, say, the Daily Mirror or even the Guardian.

Sir Keith Joseph, also high-minded and cerebral, was a similar other-worldly type. We should be glad there are always a few around to raise the tone, even if the price is that they occasionally leave "private and confidential" papers in the bin.

As the shadow home secretary and shadow chancellor, Letwin has never been successful on the frontline and so has retreated to becoming Cameron's policy shield, his Gandalf, the man who reads the small print.

When I heard that he had pronounced Andrew Lansley's vast and confusing health and social care bill "intellectually coherent" – Cameron and Clegg both signed off on it – I feared that trouble loomed. It did.

But let it not be forgotten that Letwin was the MP who said he'd rather beg in the street than let his kids attend a local primary school near his London home in Lambeth. Deplorable, but many people will quietly nod their heads all the same.

In fairness to him, he has a kind and liberal side – which is the source of the most famous Letwin story. Which of us can forget the time two strangers knocked on his Lambeth door at 5am and asked to use the lavatory before making off with credit cards and other belongings? The then 45-year-old MP, by no means slim, chased them in his pyjamas (stripey, I imagine) – and got the cards back. Magic!